7th August 2000

Satisfied with JPG, but can't jive with the lossy compression? Content with GIF, but feeling constrained by the 256 color limit? Happy with BMP, but horrified by the bloated file size? There's another image type that growing in popularity: PNG! IE users can view 'em inline, and with most of the world using Microsoft's browser, what's your excuse for not working with this new graphic format... especially when you're sending screen shots to someone. I snapped a 1600x1200 pixel, 32-bit (high color) one the other day and it weighed in under 100k. Long story short: don't use BMP if PNG will suffice. Both sport lossless compression algorithms, but the Portable Network Graphic will be infinitely smaller (in terms of file size).